These proceedings provide an overview of the new results obtained with the ATLAS detector at the LHC, which were presented in the Quark Matter 2017 conference. These results were covered by twelve ...parallel talks, one flash talk and eleven posters. These proceedings group these results into five areas: initial state, jet quenching, quarkonium production, longitudinal flow dynamics, and collectivity in small systems.
In 19 patients with closed-loop intestinal obstruction, including 16 patients with strangulating obstruction, the findings at examination with computed tomography (CT) were retrospectively correlated ...with the surgical and pathologic findings and evaluated by two radiologists. Signs of closed-loop obstruction, present in 15 patients, were associated with the configuration of the incarcerated loop of small bowel, abnormalities detected at the site of obstruction, or both. These abnormalities were the following: a U-shaped, distended, fluid-filled bowel loop; the whirl sign; the beak sign; a triangular loop; two adjacent collapsed loops of bowel at the site of obstruction; or all of these. CT signs of strangulation, seen in 10 of the 16 patients with ischemic or infarcted bowel, were associated with the appearance of the bowel wall (thickening, high attenuation, and the target sign), abnormalities in the attached mesentery, or both. In mechanical obstruction of the small bowel, detection of ischemic changes in the bowel wall or mesentery with CT indicates strangulation. Absence of CT findings of ischemia or infarction does not rule out strangulation.
Urinary monocyte chemoattractant protein-1 (MCP-1) and hepcidin are potential biomarkers of renal inflammation. We examined their association with development of diabetic nephropathy (DN) lesions in ...normotensive normoalbuminuric subjects with type 1 diabetes (T1D) from the Renin-Angiotensin System Study.
Biomarker concentrations were measured in baseline urine samples from 224 subjects who underwent kidney biopsies at baseline and after 5 years. Fifty-eight urine samples below the limit of quantitation (LOQ, 28.8 pg/mL) of the MCP-1 assay were assigned concentrations of LOQ/√2 for analysis. Relationships between ln(MCP-1/Cr) or ln(hepcidin/Cr) and morphometric variables were assessed by sex using multiple linear regression after adjustment for age, T1D duration, HbA1c, mean arterial pressure, albumin excretion rate (AER) and glomerular filtration rate (GFR). In models that examined changes in morphometric variables, the baseline morphometric value was also included.
Baseline mean age was 24.6 years, mean duration of T1D 11.2 years, median AER 6.4 µg/min and mean iohexol GFR 129 mL/min/1.73 m(2). No associations were found between hepcidin/Cr and morphometric variables. Higher MCP-1/Cr was associated with higher interstitial fractional volume at baseline and after 5 years in women (baseline partial r = 0.244, P = 0.024; 5-year partial r = 0.299, P = 0.005), but not in men (baseline partial r = -0.049, P = 0.678; 5-year partial r = 0.026, P = 0.830). MCP-1 was not associated with glomerular lesions in either sex.
Elevated urinary MCP-1 concentration measured before clinical findings of DN in women with T1D was associated with changes in kidney interstitial volume, suggesting that inflammatory processes may be involved in the pathogenesis of early interstitial changes in DN.
Objectives:
Wolfram syndrome is a progressive neurodegenerative syndrome characterized by the features “DIDMOAD” (diabetes insipidus, diabetes mellitus, optic atrophy, and deafness). We sought to ...study the audiometric data of genotyped Wolfram syndrome patients with sensorineural hearing impairment.
Methods:
Pure tone threshold data of 23 Wolfram syndrome patients were used for cross-sectional analysis in subgroups (age less than 16 years or between 19 and 25 years, gender, and origin).
Results:
All subgroups, with 1 exception, showed a fairly similar type of hearing impairment with, on average, thresholds of about 25 dB (range, 0 to 65 dB) at 0.25 to 1 kHz, gently sloping downward to about 60 dB (range, 25 to 95 dB) at 8 kHz. The subgroup of Dutch women, which was excluded from the calculations of the average hearing thresholds, showed a higher degree of hearing impairment. Only the latter subgroup showed progression; however, contrary to the previous longitudinal analysis, progression was not significant in the present cross-sectional analysis, presumably because of the high degree of cross-subject variability.
Conclusions:
This unique collection of audiometric data from genotyped Wolfram syndrome patients shows no substantial progression in sensorineural hearing impairment with advancing age, no relation to the types of WFS1 mutations identified, and, with exclusion of the subgroup of Dutch female patients, no significant sex-related differences.
A search for a narrow scalar resonance decaying into an opposite-sign muon pair produced in events with and without b-tagged jets is presented in this paper. The search uses 36.1 fb-1 of $ ...\sqrt{s}=13 $ TeV proton-proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at the LHC. No significant excess of events above the expected Standard Model background is observed in the investigated mass range of 0.2 to 1.0 TeV. The observed upper limits at 95% confidence level on the cross section times branching ratio for b-quark associated production and gluon-gluon fusion are between 1.9 and 41 fb and 1.6 and 44 fb respectively, which is consistent with expectations. Figure not available: see fulltext..
A search for excited electrons produced in pp collisions at $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV via a contact interaction $q\overline{q}$ → ee* is presented. The search uses 36.1 fb-1 of data collected in 2015 and ...2016 by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider. Decays of the excited electron into an electron and a pair of quarks ($eq\overline{q}$) are targeted in final states with two electrons and two hadronic jets, and decays via a gauge interaction into a neutrino and a W boson (νW) are probed in final states with an electron, missing transverse momentum, and a large-radius jet consistent with a hadronically decaying W boson. No significant excess is observed over the expected backgrounds. Upper limits are calculated for the pp→ ee*→$eeq\overline{q}$ and pp→ ee*→ eνW production cross sections as a function of the excited electron mass $m_{e*}$ at 95% confidence level. The limits are translated into lower bounds on the compositeness scale parameter Λ of the model as a function of $m_{e*}$. For $m_{e*}$ <0.5 TeV, the lower bound for Λ is 11 TeV. In the special case of $m_{e*}$=Λ, the values of $m_{e*}$< 4.8 TeV are excluded. The presented limits on Λ are more stringent than those obtained in previous searches.
Ischemia and reperfusion result in mitochondrial dysfunction, with decreases in oxidative capacity, loss of cytochrome c, and generation of reactive oxygen species. During ischemia of the isolated ...perfused rabbit heart, subsarcolemmal mitochondria, located beneath the plasma membrane, sustain a loss of the phospholipid cardiolipin, with decreases in oxidative metabolism through cytochrome oxidase and the loss of cytochrome c. We asked whether additional injury to the distal electron chain involving cardiolipin with loss of cytochrome c and cytochrome oxidase occurs during reperfusion. Reperfusion did not lead to additional damage in the distal electron transport chain. Oxidation through cytochrome oxidase and the content of cytochrome c did not further decrease during reperfusion. Thus injury to cardiolipin, cytochrome c, and cytochrome oxidase occurs during ischemia rather than during reperfusion. The ischemic injury leads to persistent defects in oxidative function during the early reperfusion period. The decrease in cardiolipin content accompanied by persistent decrements in the content of cytochrome c and oxidation through cytochrome oxidase is a potential mechanism of additional myocyte injury during reperfusion.
To prevent later developmental impairments, myringotomy with the insertion of tympanostomy tubes has often been undertaken in young children who have persistent otitis media with effusion. We ...previously reported that prompt as compared with delayed insertion of tympanostomy tubes in children with persistent effusion who were younger than three years of age did not result in improved developmental outcomes at three or four years of age. However, the effect on the outcomes of school-age children is unknown.
We enrolled 6350 healthy infants younger than 62 days of age and evaluated them regularly for middle-ear effusion. Before three years of age, 429 children with persistent middle-ear effusion were randomly assigned to have tympanostomy tubes inserted either promptly or up to nine months later if effusion persisted. We assessed developmental outcomes in 395 of these children at six years of age.
At six years of age, 85 percent of children in the early-treatment group and 41 percent in the delayed-treatment group had received tympanostomy tubes. There were no significant differences in mean (+/-SD) scores favoring early versus delayed treatment on any of 30 measures, including the Wechsler Full-Scale Intelligence Quotient (98+/-13 vs. 98+/-14); Number of Different Words test, a measure of word diversity (183+/-36 vs. 175+/-36); Percentage of Consonants Correct-Revised test, a measure of speech-sound production (96+/-2 vs. 96+/-3); the SCAN test, a measure of central auditory processing (95+/-15 vs. 96+/-14); and several measures of behavior and emotion.
In otherwise healthy children younger than three years of age who have persistent middle-ear effusion within the duration of effusion that we studied, prompt insertion of tympanostomy tubes does not improve developmental outcomes at six years of age.
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